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Adding More Jewish Voices to the Discussion

Just starting a journal called The Jewish Review of Books invites a joke: “Wait, don’t we already have a Jewish review of books — or several?”

Given the substantial representation of Jews in intellectual life, it’s not surprising that major book-review sections feature plenty of recognizably Jewish names. Many of today’s best young critics, like Elaine Blair, Joshua Cohen and Ruth Franklin, are Jewish. And The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic and other leading journals regularly cover books about Jewish history, culture and politics.

Why, then, did anyone think that a Jewish book review was necessary? A similar question might be asked about Books & Culture, “a Christian review,” according to its masthead. Both are elegantly written and appear on a leisurely schedule — The Jewish Review, first published this spring, will be a quarterly, while Books & Culture has been a bimonthly since 1995.

But who needs them? If I can read the critic Adam Kirsch on Slate.com, do I need The Jewish Review of Books? And if I can read Alan Wolfe in Washington Monthly, do I need Books & Culture? Put another way: what makes a Jewish book review “Jewish,” and what makes a Christian book review “Christian”? Is this just niche marketing, or are they in some way essentially, religiously, different?

In an interview this week, the editor of The Jewish Review of Books, Abraham Socher, did not identify anything intrinsically Jewish about the prose he hopes to publish. Rather, he said that he wanted to do something like The New York Review of Books, but more Jewish, and intentionally so.

“To quote, unfortunately, Mao, ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom,’ ” Mr. Socher said. “There’s a certain kind of essay that not only reports on some intellectual development but actually advances the field. So, to give a non-Jewish example, John R. Searle’s pieceson the philosophy of mind in The New York Review” — these pieces are scholarly but accessible to the nonexpert. One can find them in The New Republic, too, Mr. Socher said, and “occasionally The New Yorker,” but his magazine’s mission is different: “the exploration and furthering of Jewish thought and Jewish culture, broadly and sort of small-c catholically conceived.”

Mr. Socher also hopes to provide a politically neutral zone for discussion. The Jewish monthly Commentary publishes good long reviews, Mr. Socher said, but he implied that it exists mainly to push its conservative political agenda. “I have great respect for Commentary, and have contributed to it,” he said, but he did not believe that even Commentary considers the exploration of Jewish thought and culture “as its primary editorial purpose.”

He might have added that The New Republic is so identified with Zionism, and The New York Review with skepticism about Israel, that many minds may have closed to those publications. The Jewish Review of Books’ editorial board is free of notable anti-Zionists, but it includes liberals as well as far-right types like the Harvard professor Ruth R. Wisse. And who can resist a back page featuring a cartoon by Harvey Pekar, of “American Splendor” fame?

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The nod to pop culture would please John Wilson, a polymath who has read as much Philip K. Dick as he has John Calvin, and who has edited Books & Culture from the start. He thinks of his review “as a conversation,” he said this week, in which “mostly Christians — though not all, we have some wonderful contrarians, and atheists — have nothing in common except they are not scandalized to appear in the same magazine where people talk about Jesus.”

Despite its small cadre of non-Christian contributors (which includes this writer), Books & Culture does indeed have a very Christian feel. It has a passionate following among evangelical intellectuals, and it is published by the same nonprofit organization as Christianity Today, a glossy magazine for evangelicals. A recent Books & Culture editorial, about the Haiti earthquake, is titled “Faith Makes Us Live.”

The books reviewed have included recent works by Michael Chabon and Chinua Achebe, but they are quite often from Christian presses rarely covered by more mainstream reviews, presses like Eerdmans and Brazos.

And there are many contributors whose openness about faith, or their jobs at evangelical colleges, have probably cost them assignments in secular reviews. Mr. Wilson mentioned Mark A. Noll, a history professor at Notre Dame and an eminent evangelical historian, who writes reviews for Books & Culture that would fit well in the great secular periodicals.

Books & Culture serves, in part, as a salutary source of affirmative action for Christian intellectuals. The March/April issue has reviews by five professors from Wheaton College, the Christian school in Illinois — a bit extreme, perhaps, but an understandable corrective, given many New York editors’ discomfort with openly religious thinkers.

Books & Culture, which has 14,000 subscribers, and The Jewish Review of Books are spaces in which very smart people with academic credentials can show their religious sides. They are like what the best sports magazines would be if all the writers favored your team. Jews can write about whether a new prayer book is user-friendly; Christians can carry on about the popular Anglican bishop N. T. Wright. In this regard, both magazines keep good company with First Things, the conservative monthly about religion and public life; Tablet, the Jewish online magazine; and The Forward, the Jewish newspaper.